Digital Twin for Decision-Support: An Insight into the Integration of Simulation Models into Digital Twin Architectures

The fourth industrial revolution aims to achieve greater flexibility and adaptability in manufacturing systems through the use of information and communication technologies. The Digital Twin technology has emerged as a promising solution to support human-centred decision-making in this context. Despite the growing interest in this area, there is still a lack of applications that integrate decision-support functionality and emphasize the relationship between real-time Digital Twin models and what-if simulation models. Hence, this paper discusses the integration of simulation models into a Digital Twin architecture to assist operators in making appropriate decisions. A proof of concept is presented to demonstrate the feasibility of this approach and to open up perspectives for further research in this area.